Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Big Lies

I am not much for New Year’s resolutions and can’t recall at time when I have made any specifically for a coming new year. It just seems pointless. If a resolution must be made, then what matters what day it actually is? A resolution does not carry more weight if it’s made on one day versus another. I am no more likely to maintain my resolve if my commitment is made on the 1st day of a new year than on the 17th or 265th day of any given year.

Having said that, I spent a great deal of time of my vacation thinking about how I want to shape the coming year for myself and what I need to do to reach each of those personal benchmarks throughout the entire next year. This year is a little different than previous years as I want to do more than just survive whatever outrageous slings and arrows life throws my way. I still want to survive but this year I have very specific things I want to accomplish and when vacation time roles around next December, I want to be able to look back and tick those goals off my list in order than I can move on to make new ones.

The reason resolutions and commitment are at the forefront of my mind this morning is not because it’s the start of a new year or the fact I spent last month making my own resolutions, but because I read Caroline Glick’s most recent column in the Jerusalem Post on Big Lies:

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Yasser Arafat was a master of the big lie. Since he invented global terrorism with the founding of the Fatah terror organization in 1959, Arafat successfully portrayed himself as a freedom fighter while introducing the world to passenger jet hijackings, schoolhouse massacres and embassy takeovers.

To cultivate the myth of his innocence Arafat ordered his Fatah terror cells to operate under pseudonyms. In the early 1970's he renamed several Fatah murder squads the Black September Organization while publicly claiming that they were "breakaway" units completely unrelated to Fatah or to himself.

In 2000, as he launched the current Palestinian jihad, he repeated the process by renaming Fatah terror cells the Aksa Martyr Brigades and then claiming that they were completely unrelated to Fatah or to himself. This fiction too, has been successful in spite of the fact that all Aksa Martyr Brigades terrorists are members of Fatah and most are members of Palestinian Authority official militias who receive their salaries, guns and marching orders from Fatah.

Last week, with the quiet release of a 33-year-old US State Department cable, a good chunk of the edifice of his great lie was destroyed.

ON MARCH 1, 1973, eight Fatah terrorists, operating under the Black September banner stormed the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan during a farewell party for the US Embassy's Charges d'Affaires George Curtis Moore. The terrorists took Moore, US ambassador Cleo Noel, Belgian Charges d'Affairs Guy Eid and two Arab diplomats hostage. They demanded that the US, Israel, Jordan and Germany release PLO and Baader-Meinhof Gang terrorists, including Robert F. Kennedy's Palestinian assassin Sirhan Sirhan and Black September commander Muhammed Awadh (Abu Daud), from prison in exchange for the hostages' release.

The next evening, the Palestinians brutally murdered Noel, Moore, and Eid. They released their other hostages on March 4. Arafat denied any involvement in the attack. The US officially accepted his denial. Yet, as he later publicly revealed, James Welsh, who served at the time of the attack as an analyst at the National Security Agency, intercepted a communication from Arafat, then headquartered in Beirut to his terror agents in Khartoum ordering the attack.

In 1986, as evidence of Arafat's involvement in the operation became more widely known, more and more voices began calling for Arafat to be investigated for murder. As the New York Sun's online blog recalled last week, during that period, Britain's Sunday Times reported that 44 US senators sent a letter to then US attorney-general Edwin Meese, "urging the American government to charge the PLO chief with plotting the murders of two American diplomats in 1973."

The article went on to note that the Justice Department's interest in pursuing the matter was making senior State Department officials uneasy: "State Department diplomats, worried that murder charges against Arafat would anger the United States' friends in the Arab world, are urging the Justice Department to drop the investigation."

There has been no doubt in my mind that Arafat was behind the acts of the terrorist group Black September. I never brought the arguments put forth from the professional Palestinian apologistas who long maintained the fiction that these acts by Black September or even Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade are splinter breakaway groups. All one has to do is read the names of the roll call of Fatah and know that no independent breakaway splint group has the resources or finances to bank roll successive operations without the shelter and support of a much larger organization.

What is interesting in my mind is how much and how long the US State Department has invested in keeping Fatah’s Big Lie going - no matter what price or the cost in human lives. And going is the operative word here. The truly scary part is that Black September may be disbanded but the terror networks of Fatah have never been cut off or shut down, and yet, this is the group that successive US Administrations seek to strengthened and finance. Now that’s real resolve and commitment.

What we all should be asking is how many more big lies the US State Department has a vested interest in maintaining? The future of all our children's lives may depend on it.